Description:This course explores how gender and race are experienced and expressed through food. It starts from the premise that food is at once political and quotidian, and this is what gives it power. Far from a benign activity, preparing and consuming food becomes a forum for the performance, reproduction, negotiation, manipulation, and at times rejection of racial and gendered identities. Readings and discussions address how appetites are marked by gender and race, how cooking has served as a medium of female oppression and empowerment, how soul food evolved as a productive and problematic symbol of blackness, and how identities change through distance and difference. Topics include home-cooking, ethnic restaurants, norms of taste and pleasure, ideal bodily images, migration and diaspora, and the shifting location of women and racial minorities within the food system today.